Kubla Ports Technical Manual
Kubla Ports uses the cutting-edge triangular prism method to calculate dredging volumes.
This method starts by triangulating the existing terrain. This involves joining the points in the existing bathymetry to create a continuous surface of connected triangles. This is known as a Triangulated Irregular Network, or TIN for short. This step is repeated for the proposed dredging levels.
The next stage is to merge these two triangulations, to create a third triangulation which contains all the edges of the original triangulations. This merged mesh will be used to perform the calculations. Merging the two input triangulations means that every detail of both the existing and the proposed will be included in the calculations. This is the basis of this method's accuracy.
The last stage is to calculate the cut and fill of each vertex on the calculation TIN. These values can be used to calculate the cut and fill for each triangle, and the total volumes are easily obtained by adding the volumes of each individual triangular prism together.